Word: ace
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Junior is, by any outside standards, a loser. When he returns to Prescott, it's to a family broken by his cowboy father's rodeo roistering and his younger brother's commercialism: Curly Bonner turns the homestead ranch into a site for electrically-equipped mobile homes (Ace Bonner has agreed to it after losing all his cash in hair-brained prospecting schemes), and the mother is going to be installed in the development curio shop. Junior himself is swiftly losing the respect he once held in other men's eyes. He asks stock contractor Buck Roan (played fullheartedly...
...never appreciated that Arizona morning, and hustle like carney hucksters to package the West which gives them their identity and heritage and sell it for a price--if it makes surviving easier. Junior can't settle for that mediocrity, can't stand it: he much prefers his old man. Ace, with dirt-sense and not without some self-knowledge, simply can't see much point to the ways you have to make a living when the ranges are fenced and the mines drained. But Junior knows his limits as well. Ace couldn't raise the family, couldn't do right...
...give them, a plot of ground they can rest their tired hams on and raise the children that will be as undeniably stupid as themselves. And Peckinpah also shows what happens to those who sense that something is wrong, but can't yet formulate an alternative: they become like Ace and his son Junior...
Being a new boy in town is nothing new to Knowles. The son of a World War I flying ace who became a successful drug company executive, Knowles attended schools, some private, in the cities where his father was stationed. After college (Harvard), he took his M.D. at Washington University in St. Louis, then interned at M.G.H. and was soon carving a promising career in research and the treatment of respiratory diseases. Ten years ago, when he was only 35, Knowles was named general director of M.G.H., the youngest in its 150-year history...
...Tour's themes was the vanity and vulnerability of youth; he embodied it in his extraordinary masterpiece The Cardsharp with the Ace of Diamonds. A boy, caparisoned in plumes, brocade and lace, is gambling against a courtesan who is about to get, from the cardsharp's waistband, the crucial ace. It is a familiar genre situation, but La Tour impregnated it with a subtle psychological tension. The shifty ballet of the eyeballs runs its counterpoint to the expressive gestures of the hands - the soft, uncertain dandyism in the boy, the momentary apprehension of the serving girl, whose glance...